Pendulums, WebGL and three.js

02 December 2011

Here's the waves pendulum three.js simulation I made.
 So I wanted to simulate a magical pendulum with waves to prove my point that the shapes are the result of a dead simple arithmetic progression. I was almost correct.
After testing, I saw that when the frequency is an arithmetic progression we get the awesome patterns. The problem is that achieving such a feat by modifying the length of the strings alone is a bit harder. Here's omega, or the angular frequency from hyperphysics: w = sqrt(g/L) So all I had to do was choose omegas, increment them and from that calculate the string lengths. I got mixed up and solved the problem in a much more complicated way. Anyhow, by faking it (choosing my omegas with bogus L's) I get a prettier result. Headache averted. I'm not sure these swing angles are simple pendulums anyway. WebGL and three.js are indeed awesome. It does have its gotchas but I was just so impressed with http://lights.elliegoulding.com/ and other things in the three.js gallery. It's amazing how simple and accessible opengl is now that it's in the browser. The "hello world" of about 20 lines for a rotating cube was good though I think it should include the WebGL detection in it.